Central Public Authorities Received 17,95,024 RTI Applications in 2024-25, and the Act Behind Them Lets Any Citizen Ask for a Rs 10 Fee and Expect an Answer in 30 Days

In 2024-25 the Central Information Commission recorded 17,95,024 Right to Information (RTI) requests to 2,303 central public authorities, from ministries to government companies. The count is in the Commission’s annual report. It is up from 17,50,863 the year before and from 1,71,398 in 2006-07, and adding the 19 annual figures in the Commission’s tables gives roughly 1.86 crore requests (our arithmetic). Two limits apply. Only 1,412 authorities were registered in 2006-07, so part of the rise is more bodies reporting. And the tables cover authorities answerable to the Union government, Union territory administrations included, because state authorities report to their own state commissions.

The Ministry of Corporate Affairs received the most in 2024-25, 2,54,657, followed by Finance with 2,20,283 and Railways with 2,00,018. This piece follows one request through the Act, then covers two open arguments: who runs the commissions, and how far personal information is protected.

How a request is filed and what the clock says

Section 3 of the Act gives the right to “all citizens”, and the central portal says the same of its users. The right covers information “held by or under the control of” a public authority, which takes in bodies created by the Constitution, by a law of Parliament or a state legislature, or by a government order, and non-government organisations substantially funded by the government. Section 2(f) defines information as material in any form, including records, memos, e-mails, opinions, contracts and logbooks, and Section 2(j) adds the right to inspect work and take certified samples.

Check first what the authority must already publish. Section 4(1)(b) lists 17 headings, among them each officer’s monthly pay, every agency’s budget, and who received subsidies.

A request goes in writing, on paper or electronically, to the authority’s Public Information Officer. The Act calls the officer a Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) in a central body and a State Public Information Officer in a state body. English, Hindi or the area’s official language is allowed. Under Section 6(2) the applicant gives no reason and no personal details beyond what is needed to reply.

For central authorities the fee comes from the Right to Information Rules, 2012. It is Rs 10, and an application should ordinarily stay within 500 words, though Rule 3 says none may be rejected for length alone. Copies cost Rs 2 a page, inspection is free for the first hour and Rs 5 an hour after that, and a person below the poverty line pays nothing on showing a certificate. The Act leaves fees to rules made by the “appropriate Government”, so states set their own. The RTI Online portal, which takes UPI, cards and net banking, accepts only central bodies and sends back applications meant for state authorities.

Section 7 starts a 30-day clock. Where the information concerns a person’s life or liberty, the deadline is 48 hours. If the application is handed to an assistant officer, five days are added, and an officer who holds the wrong file must transfer it within five days. In 2024-25 authorities reported 2,80,353 such transfers. Silence counts as refusal under Section 7(2), and late information must be supplied free.

What an officer can refuse

Section 8(1) lists ten grounds. They cover information that would harm India’s sovereignty, security, or strategic, scientific or economic interests; anything a court has forbidden to be published; breach of the privilege of Parliament or a state legislature; trade secrets and commercial confidence; information held in a fiduciary relationship; confidences from a foreign government; information that would endanger a life or identify a confidential source; information that would impede an investigation; Cabinet papers; and personal information. Cabinet decisions and their reasons must be made public once the matter is over.

Several provisions pull the other way. Section 8(2) lets an authority disclose even exempt information if the public interest in disclosure outweighs the harm, and Section 22 gives the Act priority over the Official Secrets Act, 1923. Under Section 8(3), events more than twenty years old must be supplied, except those under the security, privilege and Cabinet grounds. Section 24 excludes the intelligence and security bodies on the Second Schedule, which include the Intelligence Bureau, the Research and Analysis Wing and the National Investigation Agency, but allegations of corruption and human rights violations stay inside the Act.

In 2024-25 authorities rejected 58,501 requests, 3.26 per cent of those received, compared with 9 per cent in 2006-07. The share differs by ministry. The Commission’s table shows the Home Affairs ministry rejecting 13.33 per cent of 58,130 requests and Finance 8.50 per cent, while Corporate Affairs rejected 351 of 2,54,657. Officers recorded 57,985 uses of provisions when rejecting requests, 20,059 of them filed under “others”. Among the named grounds, the personal-information clause, Section 8(1)(j), was cited 14,675 times, about one in four of all records, ahead of Section 24 at 8,251.

Appeals, penalties and the three levels

An applicant who gets no answer, or an answer that is wrong, has 30 days under Section 19(1) to appeal to an officer senior to the CPIO in the same authority. That officer must decide within 30 days, extendable to 45. A second appeal goes to the Central Information Commission, or the State Information Commission, within 90 days. Section 18 separately lets anyone complain to the Commission about a refused application or an unreasonable fee.

Section 19(5) puts the onus of proving that a denial was justified on the CPIO who denied the request. Commission decisions are binding, and the Commission can order disclosure, compensation, changes in record-keeping and penalties. Section 20 sets a fine of Rs 250 for each day of delay up to Rs 25,000, after a hearing, and the officer carries the burden of showing he or she acted reasonably. Persistent defaults can bring a recommendation of disciplinary action.

The 2024-25 report counts 1,86,312 first appeals received and 1,12,521 disposed of by authorities. The Commission itself registered 19,341 second appeals and complaints, disposed of 19,415 and had 23,146 pending on 1 April 2025. It imposed penalties of Rs 1,56,750 under Section 20(1) that year and received Rs 99,815 of that amount.

From a village in Rajasthan to Parliament

The Supreme Court had read a right to know into free speech long before the Act. In State of Uttar Pradesh v. Raj Narain (1975) a Constitution Bench derived it from the concept of free speech, and in S.P. Gupta v. President of India (1981) a seven-judge bench called open government implicit in Article 19(1)(a), both rulings the Court recited in 2019. The provision itself is explained in our guide to fundamental rights in Articles 12 to 35.

The campaign for a statute came from the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS, the Workers and Peasants Strength Union), which The Week reports was formally founded on 1 May 1990 in Devdungri, Rajasthan. In September 1995 an MKSS meeting in Beawar made what the magazine calls the first public demand for a right to information in law. A 40-day sit-in followed in 1996 and, The Week says, spurred the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information. Rajasthan passed its own RTI Act in 2000.

At the national level, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative traces the draft law to a working group chaired by H. D. Shourie in 1997. Parliament passed a Freedom of Information Act in December 2002, and the President gave assent in January 2003, but no commencement date was ever notified, so it never operated. A National Advisory Council, set up after the change of government in May 2004, suggested changes, and the government decided to repeal the 2002 Act. The new Bill was tabled in the Lok Sabha on 23 December 2004, and the Lok Sabha passed it on 11 May 2005 and the Rajya Sabha on 12 May 2005. Assent came on 15 June 2005. Most provisions took effect on the 120th day after enactment, 12 October 2005. The Bill’s Statement of Objects listed an appeals machinery with powers of investigation, penalties for failure to provide information, and maximum disclosure with minimum exemptions.

Who runs the commissions, and the 2019 change

Under Section 12 the Central Information Commission has a Chief Information Commissioner and up to ten Information Commissioners. The President appoints them on the recommendation of a committee of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and a Union Cabinet minister the Prime Minister nominates. Removal for misbehaviour or incapacity needs a Supreme Court inquiry first.

The 2005 Act gave commissioners five years or age 65, whichever came first, and pay equal to that of the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners (how the Election Commission works). The Right to Information (Amendment) Bill, 2019 was introduced on 19 July 2019, passed by the Lok Sabha on 22 July and by the Rajya Sabha on 25 July, and it moved those terms to rules made by the Central Government. The rules of 24 October 2019 fixed the term at three years.

The government’s Statement of Objects gave its reason. The Election Commission is a constitutional body under Article 324(1), it said, while the information commissions are statutory bodies created by the 2005 Act, so their mandates differ and their status “need to be rationalised accordingly”. Seven former commissioners, among them former Chief Information Commissioners Wajahat Habibullah and Deepak Sandhu, called the change “a direct attack on the autonomy of information commissions” at a press conference in July 2019. Habibullah said that if reform was needed the commissions should become constitutional bodies. The change followed the ordinary route for a Bill, described in how a Bill becomes an Act.

Vacancies and backlogs have been the other test. On 15 February 2019 a two-judge bench in Anjali Bhardwaj v. Union of India directed that vacancies be filled without delay, that every state follow the central practice of putting appointment particulars on a website, that shortlisting criteria be made public, and that commissioners come from the fields the Act lists and not only from government service. Satark Nagrik Sangathan, a citizens’ group, counted 4,13,972 appeals and complaints pending across 29 commissions on 30 June 2025, with 18 commissions facing waits of more than a year. A PTI report of 13 October 2026 on its latest report card gives 3.85 lakh pending across 28 commissions on 30 June 2026, and says the Central Information Commission’s pending cases rose by 9,378 between 1 January and 12 October 2026, although it had all 11 members. It also says nine commissions returned 37,701 cases without orders between July 2025 and June 2026, including 14,603 of the 31,179 the Central Information Commission registered. The group’s founder said some were returned over minor defects such as missing page numbers.

Personal information and the 2025 change

Until 2025, Section 8(1)(j) exempted personal information whose disclosure had “no relationship to any public activity or interest”, or which would cause an unwarranted invasion of privacy, unless the officer or appellate authority was satisfied that the larger public interest justified disclosure. A proviso said information that cannot be denied to Parliament or a State Legislature cannot be denied to any person. The Supreme Court quotes that text in its judgment of 13 November 2019 in Central Public Information Officer v. Subhash Chandra Agarwal. In that case five judges examined how far the Act reaches the judiciary, and held that the fact of whether judges have declared their assets is not the judges’ private information, while the contents of declarations pass through the Section 8(1)(j) test and the Section 11 third-party notice procedure. A concurring opinion added that the basis for choosing judges “must be defined and placed in the public realm”, a point taken up in our explanation of how India appoints its judges.

Section 44 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 replaced the clause. The consolidated text on the Commission’s website records the substitution as effective from 13 November 2025, and the new clause reads in full “information which relates to personal information”. The test and the proviso are gone from Section 8(1)(j), while Section 8(2) remains.

The two sides read that differently. In a letter dated 10 April 2025, replying to critics that included an opposition member of Parliament, the Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology wrote that the RTI Act still allows disclosure of personal information in the larger public interest and that the data law is consistent with the Supreme Court’s privacy ruling in Puttaswamy. Three petitions are before the Supreme Court, by Venkatesh Nayak, The Reporters Collective Trust and the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, who argue that the clause now works as a blanket exemption. On 16 February 2026 a three-judge bench led by the Chief Justice of India issued notice to the Union, declined to stay the law and referred the matter to a larger bench. At a hearing on 7 August 2026 the bench said it would examine whether treating digital personal data differently from other information has a rational basis and whether the law may impose a blanket bar on disclosing personal information. A report of that hearing records that the Union’s counter affidavit was still awaited.